[talk-au] Cycling on Victorian paths

[forster at ozonline.com.au]

Hi all

I am thinking that unless we pay a lawyer and get a legal opinion we  
will never be sure what the law is.

Given that uncertainty we have two principles to choose from, I'll  
call them the "precautionary principle" and the "somebody else's  
problem" principle. (Maybe better called the ground truth principle.)

I hope this does not misrepresent anybody's position but I think  
Sebastian Azagra would say that we have a moral responsibility to  
protect people from the risk of getting a large fine.

I and others have argued that we OSM should stop at recording what is  
on the ground and leave the difficult legal interpretation to map  
renderers.

Not sure how we arrive at a resolution.

Tony

> On 3/10/21 9:13 am, Sebastian Azagra via Talk-au wrote:
>> In my view, some of the data in OSM is incorrect as a footpath will  
>>  some times have permission bicycle=yes which is incorrect. The   
>> majority of the time allowed access will have bicycle=unspecified   
>> (not defined)which I think is fine.
>> The issue is that cycling software, apps and gps units used by   
>> cyclist takes information from OSM and then creates a route based   
>> on the permission assigned to the road/path in OSM.
>
> In Victoria cycling is not allowed on most footpaths (for most adults).
> The is defined in the wiki at
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_tags_for_routing/Access_restrictions#Australia
> and more formally in OSM at https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/2316741
>
> As far as I'm concerned, routing software should be using these as part
> of the decision on when to route bikes down footpaths. Any software
> which ignores these should be have a bug report logged. We should not
> tag all footpaths with bicycle=no just for software which doesn't
> understand the defaults already configured in OSM.
>
> It looks like Thosten Engler[*] has just said the same thing.
>
> [*] Is that the name of the person using
> osm.talk-au at thorsten.engler.id.au? You don't appear to have used a name
> in your email so I'm guessing based on your email domain, but as
> domains often get used by multiple people there is no guarantee that
> I'm right.
>
> Regards,
> Kim